Best cloud management tools

By Computerworld UK Staff,Computerworld|

Most cloud computing platforms run a pay-as-you-go model and this can make managing the general usage and costs difficult. It is surprisingly easy for your cloud costs to get out of hand, and for small-medium businesses, this is a major concern.

To help, we've compiled a list of cloud computing management tools that aim to help manage costs, usage and ultimately optimise the cloud.

RackWare

RackWareprovides a hybrid cloud management platform, which extends across physical and virtual environments.

It provides availability and flexibility for enterprise IT users, along with reduced costs for enterprise IT providers whilst also providing disaster recovery, cloud migration and other computing services.

The platform is designed to automate the movement and management of complex application workloads and also reduces costs of cloud expenditures, with a 40 to 50 percent reduction of traditional IT solutions costs, according to the vendor.

Apptio

Apptio specialises in what it has coined 'technology business management' or 'TBM' software, allowing IT leaders to get a full picture of their cloud environments in order to rationalise their spending.

Through a range of software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools, Apptio gives IT access to the tools and dashboards needed to monitor various IT resources across increasingly complex cloud estates. This includes IT financial management, cloud cost management and vendor insights.

This has proved itself popular in the financial services sector already, with UK banks Nationwide, RBS and Lloyds already using Apptio to rationalise their IT spend, with Nationwide saying it expects to save £6-8 million in IT costs after its first year of implementation.

Cost: As proprietary software Apptio is not cheap, costing $45,000 (£35,000) a year to manage between $0-3 million (£0-2.3 million) in annual public cloud spend for its Cloud Cost Management product, according to the AWS marketplace.

OneOps

For more general cloud management OneOps was released on an open source licence by US retail giant Walmart's labs department in 2016.

It works across the popular public cloud options and gives users visibility of all applications across cloud environments, giving users the ability to monitor, scale, and repair applications, and even the capability to move applications from one cloud to another in order to save on costs or boost performance.

Cost: As an open source solution OneOps is free to download and run on an Apache 2.0 licence.

Snow Software

Well known Swedish software asset management (SAM) vendor Snow Software has a 'Snow for Cloud' option for managing cloud resources.

The vendor says its cloud discovery, inventory and consumption tracking solutions "provide detailed analytical insight into the IaaS resources and SaaS applications being spun up and consumed, no matter who is using or paying for them."

Where Snow stands out is in its ability to give IT professionals a complete view of on-prem and cloud assets in one place.

Cost: Snow offers a free 'test drive' but pricing after that is available upon request.

Metricly

If you run AWS across your organisation then Metricly could save you 32 percent on your AWS bill, so it claims.

Offering great online support, tutorials, webinars and reams of documentation, this cloud management tool can help organisations monitor their cloud usage, integrated applications, infrastructure and public cloud costs as a whole.

Founded in 2017, Metricly is pretty new on the scene, which should be seen as a positive as it means that its systems are new and should be able to keep up with the modern, scaling business.

Its dashboard is really flexible, able to add in the specific monitoring you want.

It offers three plans, one of which uses machine learning to highlight any anomalies in your public cloud.

Cost: It has three packages, "AWS Cost Optimisation" for $5 per host/month, "Machine Learning Monitoring" for $10 per host/month or a combination package called "Cost + Monitoring Bundle" for $15 per host/month.

DivvyCloud

Able to work with all major cloud providers including AWS, Azure and Google, this cloud management service will manage cloud costs by 'enforcing your global tagging policy', as well as providing analysis of your bills so you can keep your cloud spending under control.

It will also reduce the worry associated with complying with these regulations and standards PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR, as well as many others.

Cost: Its on-premise services start at $899 per month.

Datadog

Datadogprovides a great deal of data and monitoring services, all designed to manage the cost and usage of 'any stack, any app, at any scale'.

Ideal for hybrid cloud environments, this cloud management tool can collect metrics from over 200 company integrations such as AWS, Azure, Docker, Chef, MongoDB and more.

It's pretty easy to create readable data on your cloud and storage usage. Datadog offers simple dashboards to display accurate real-time data. All you need to do is drag and drop in the metrics you want to monitor.

Cloud Management Suite

There is no need for any downloads as the tool can be accessed using a web browser. It also offers patch management which can be used to keep desktop, laptops and remote users managed and up-to-date with the latest Microsoft and third-party software updates.

Cloud Management Suite includes two-factor authentication to ensure that the login process is secure.

Cost: Users are offered a 14-day free trial, with custom pricing available on request.

Cloudyn

Cloudyn'ssoftware monitors cloud resources, making practical suggestions for optimising usage. Cloudyn will also provide cloud 'trend' reports to make sure businesses are not paying more than they should be. All this information is available on a dashboard and via email alerts.

Cloudyn claims to be the only multi-cloud monitoring and optimisation solution that supports Azure, AWS and Google Cloud with full visibility and accountability.

Cost: Cloudyn offers a free trial with other pricing available on request.

CloudController

CloudController can also be used to monitor and control multi-vendor virtualisation environments, with an effective user experience that also includes file sharing.

Cost: Custom pricing is available on request.

Cisco CloudCenter

Cisco CloudCenter,which was formerly known as CliQr, delivers multi-cloud management across multiple data centres, private and public cloud environments.

Using Cisco CloudCenter, users are able to select the best-suited environment based on the price and performance offerings.

Cost: Custom pricing available on request.

Turbonomic 6.1

Claiming to lower the cost of the public cloud on average by 30 percent, Turbonomic's hybrid cloud management tool works by enabling users to self-manage their on-premises and public clouds, in real-time.

Working across both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environments, this tool aims to help businesses manage application consumption and costs via detailed analytics and automated workflows.

Skeddly

Interestingly, in terms of security, Skeddly assumes no permissions or access to your AWS account, and it will actually create a custom IAM policy for you, so all permissions can be controlled.

Cost: Pay as you go.

Qstack

Qstackaims to reduce licensing costs by consolidating various cloud management platforms. Qstack is compatible with AWS and Azure and any EC2 compatible IaaS clouds.

What's more, Qstack works with KVM, VMware and Hyper-V while also being able to unify physical hardware, hypervisors, virtual machines, true bare metal and containers across multiple clouds and internal data centres.

Cost: Available on request.

CloudRanger

CloudRangermakes it easy to backup AWS' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Services (RDS) databases. CloudRanger even claims to reduce your AWS EC2 costs by up to 70 percent, by shutting down areas that are not currently in use.

Cost: All customers are given a 14-day free trial. Following this, pricing starts at $179 a month.

ParkMyCloud

ParkMyCloudclaims to reduce cloud computing costs by up to 65 percent in 15 minutes, by scheduling on/off times and only charging customers for the computing power they actually use.

Users will be able to manage multiple AWS and Azure accounts and save time with automated schedules and policies.

Cost: A monthly charge of $2 for basic packages and up are available. Plus a free platform is on offer.

Dynatrace

While Dynatrace application monitoring software is not specifically designed for cloud cost management, it does offer cloud monitoring services within in a dashboard format, aiming to 'eliminate all blind spots'.

Cost: Free trial available and free for up to five users. For more, custom pricing is available too.

HPE Helion Cloud Suite

Working across open source, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments, the HPE Helion Cloud Suite provides a centralised dashboard to control resources across business infrastructures enabling businesses to build and operate cloud services across their whole organisation.

According to HPE, Air France reduced its time spent provisioning infrastructure by more than 50 percent after implementing HPE hybrid cloud management solutions.

Cost: Available on request

BMC

BMChas a cloud cost management service called 'truesight capacity optimisation' which aims to bring about cost-effectiveness and cost optimisation.

CloudMatrix

CloudMatrixis from Gravitant, an IBM company and looks after budget, usage and costs through its centralised cost management system. cloudMatrix provides estimated billing which allows businesses to factor in future costs.